Famed iOS hacker Comex tweeted today that his internship at Apple has ceased. “So… no point in delaying,” he said to 195,000 followers. “As of last week, after about a year, I’m no longer associated with Apple.” Comex, whose real name Nicholas Allegra, explained to Forbes that his employment at Apple was terminated for not responding to an email. Forbes Andy Greenberg wrote:

When I followed up with Allegra in a phone call, he explained that the email he forgot to answer was an offer to continue his employment at Apple as a remote intern. At Apple, apparently, offer letters are taken rather seriously, and Allegra soon learned that his had been rescinded. “I wasn’t too happy about it, but it didn’t seem like I was able to fix it,” he says. “So that’s what it is.”

Before joining Apple as an intern over a year ago, Comex’s hacking work most notably included JailbreakMe. It is a popular tool to jailbreak iOS devices through an exploit within Safari. He also developed another popular jailbreak tool called “Spirit”.

We told you last week that Nicholas Allegra (better known as Comex), founder of JailbreakMe and popular member of the jailbreaking community, would be joining Apple for an internship this week. This left many wondering whether or not he would still be contributing to future exploits.

The answer? No. He has, however, done a quick Q&A (below) to answer some of our questions and give us insight into his views on Apple and jailbreaking.

Not only will he not contribute to future jailbreaks, it looks like he won’t be sticking around at Apple long either, as he notes plans to return to college will prevent him from taking up a permanent role. Also factoring into that decision is the fact he’s “never had a job before”, which may be because he’s received over $55,000 in donations from his jailbreaking efforts. He also thinks Apple will continue to “beat the pants off its competitors”.

When asked about Apple stealing ideas from jailbroken apps and tweaks, Comex explains:
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Comex, the founder of JailbreakMe, has just announced on Twitter that he’ll be joining Apple as an intern next week. From the sound of his tweet, it looks like Comex will be taking a break from the jailbreak community. It’s sad to see him go, but we’re pretty sure he’ll hand over the reins of JailbreakMe to someone else. We wish him the best of luck at Apple!

Tweet 1: It’s been really, really fun, but it’s also been a while and I’ve been getting bored.
Tweet 2: So, the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple.

In a profile on Comex, the 19-year old who has on three different occasions cracked open the iPhone security completely, Forbes reveals the jailbreaker’s name and MO. He’s Nicholas Allegra who lives with his parents in Chappaqua, New York and is on leave from Brown University.

On iPhone hacking, he says,

“It feels like editing an English paper,” Allegra says simply, his voice croaking as if he just woke up, though we’re speaking at 9:30 pm. “You just go through and look for errors. I don’t know why I seem to be so effective at it.”

His work has blown away his peers, if anyone can be labeled as such.

Dino Dai Zovi, co-author of the Mac Hacker’s Handbook, compares JailbreakMe’s sophistication to that of Stuxnet, a worm thought to have been designed by the Israeli or U.S. government to infect Iran’s nuclear facilities. He compares Allegra’s skills to the state-sponsored intruders that plague corporations and governments, what the cybersecurity industry calls “advanced-persistent threat” hackers: “He’s probably five years ahead of them,” says Dai Zovi.

Allegra says that 2 million iOS devices have been jailbroken with the third release of jailbreakme.com. Forbes concludes, Apple should be offering up an internship to Allegra.

We were the first ones to report that Jailbreakme.com was live last night at about 2am ET. That was about 20 hours ago. Just a few minutes ago, @chpwn tweeted that they’d surpassed a million jailbreaks on Jailbreakme.com. That’s a pretty impressive distribution vector.

Although there was some concern going in that Comex was rushed in this jailbreak, commenters seem to be impressed with the results. The process couldn’t be easier as the below video shows.

Last week’s leak revealed that @Comex had another iOS PDF exploit in the works. Looking at Jailbreakme.com this evening, it appears that a new version of the famous iOS untethered jailbreak is about to be unleashed. The ‘coming soon’ yellow sticky looks like the sticky Apple puts on its store right before new products hit the virtual shelves. expand full story